“Are you kidding?” she gasps. “I’m writing to surgeons / executives / pharmacists /school district superintendents/engineers/financial planners/horse breeders. These folks are superbly educated, brilliant and smart as a whip. There’s no way they’ll read anything that easy.”

I’ve always argued that if you think your audience members are especially elevated or educated, then you should make your copy more readable. Executives, surgeons and other highly educated readers, after all, tend to have more stuff to read and less time to read it. So we need to make messages for those folks even easier to process.

But now there’s new evidence that we should make all of our communications — even those written to highly educated, highly literate readers — easier to read and understand.

Readability helps highly literate readers.

We’d expect readability to benefit folks with low literacy. But what about highly literate readers?

That’s what the folks at the Nielsen Norman Group set out to learn in a recent study.

NNG researchers started with an off-the-shelf pharmaceutical ad. You know how hard those are to read, what with all of the legalese, caveats and disclaimers.

Then the researchers had two groups of people — highly literate folks and those with lower literacy — read the ads and answer some questions.

Highly literate group performs better. Unsurprisingly, the highly literate group outperformed those with low literacy on all three measures of success:

1. Understanding. People with higher literacy understood the message better.

The low-literacy group answered 46% of the questions right.

The highly literate group answered 82% correctly.

2. Task time. It’s only in the alternative reality world of Google Analytics Page View Time that we give ourselves more points for the longer it takes people to read. “Faster to read” has for decades been a hallmark of writing success.

Those with low literacy took 22 minutes to read the ad.

The highly literate group took only 14 minutes to read it.

3. Satisfaction. Nobody likes reading these things. But the low-literacy group enjoyed the experience even less than those with high literacy.

Those with lower literacy scored their satisfaction 2.5 on a scale of 1 to 10.

The highly literate group gave the experience a 3.7 out of 10.

Well read No surprise, the highly literate group outperformed the low literacy group on every measure of success when reading difficult copy. Image by Ann Wylie

Then the folks at the Nielsen Norman Group rewrote the ad. They used shorter sentences, shorter words and explanatory graphics to increase readability.

Highly literate perform even better with more readable copy. Unsurprisingly, the low literacy group performed significantly better on the more readable ad. The real surprise was that the highly literate group also performed much, much better with more readable copy.

1. Understanding. Both groups understood the clearer message better:

The low-literacy group answered nearly half again as many questions correctly — 68%, compared to 46%. That’s a 48% increase.

The highly literate group understood the more readable ad 13% better, answering 93% of the questions correctly, compared to 82%.

Those with lower literacy liked reading the revised ad 76% more, increasing their score from 2.5 to 4.4 on a scale of 1 to 10.

The highly literate group liked reading the revised ad 30% more, boosting their satisfaction score from 3.7 to 4.8.

“‘This is too easy to read,’ said nobody ever,” says Kate Meyer, a user experience specialist at Nielsen Norman Group. Literally, in all of the firm’s research, not one single person has ever wished that anything was harder to read.

Repeat after me: “My audience is not the exception.”

Who you callin’ dumb? Highly literate people were able to read the easier copy 64% faster, understand it 13% better and enjoy the process 30% more. What’s dumb about that? Image by Ann Wylie

There is no reason not to make all of your messages to all of your audience members easier to read. There’s nothing dumb about it.

Dumb, dumb, dumb-dumb.

I’ll be honest: The phrase “dumbing it down” makes me recoil. Leaving aside the political incorrectness of the phrase, who, exactly, do we think is “dumb” here?

It must be the reader, who isn’t smart enough, well-educated enough or willing to spend enough time to understand your lofty message in its original, magnificent form. So you have to make your dazzling message dumber and dumber until the dumb reader can finally get it.

That’s not a very respectful way to approach your audience.

I prefer to think of increasing readability not as dumbing down but as lifting up your message. When you make your message more readable, you’re respecting your reader and her time enough to take the time and effort to make it easier and faster for her to read.

You’re also respecting your message enough to get the word out to the most people in the least amount of time.

Winston Churchill wasn’t dumb.

In his “Never Give In” speech, for instance, he used words that average 4.2 characters. Its most famous passage (“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty”) weighs in at an average of just 3.6 characters per word.

“Never Give In” scores 75 on the Flesch Reading Ease Scale of 0 to 100. That puts it at about the 7th grade level, which makes it fairly easy to read.

Eloquent? Churchill won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953 for his contributions to the written word. He remains to this day one of the most respected writers in the history of the English language.

Effective? Churchill rallied the British, defied the Nazis, and inspired the United States to fight. Some say he saved the Western world with his (tiny) words.

Dumb? Not on your life.

“Short words are best,” he wrote, deftly using words of only one syllable, “and old words when short are the best of all.”

Other people who aren’t dumb

Other people who aren’t dumb include:

Abraham Lincoln. Of the 235 words in his Gettysburg Address — that’s fewer than the number on the back of a potato chip package today — 174 of them have only one syllable. Lincoln spoke for only two minutes at Gettysburg, while Edward Everett, the great orator of the day, spoke for nearly two hours. Yet who remembers what Everett said? Who remembers his name?

William Shakespeare. “Shakespeare wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound,” wrote novelist Kurt Vonnegut. “‘To be or not to be?’ asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters.”

Reporters for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Writers for both publications cover the most complex topics in science, business and the world. And they do so using words that, according to our analysis, average than 5 characters.

So who’s really dumb when it comes to “dumbing it down”? Just writers — and, let’s be fair, their subject matter experts — who believe that only big words and unruly sentences can capture their massive ideas.

Nobody wants it to be harder.

When you make your messages easier to read, everybody wins: people who struggle to understand the simplest messages, as well as highly literate, well-educated readers.

“People prefer to read and get information at a level below their capacity,” writes Douglas Mueller, president of the Gunning-Mueller Clear Writing Institute. “Even a Harvard University professor prefers to get information without strain.”

True dat.

I wrote this piece, for example, for a highly literate audience — you! It averages 4.8 character words and weighs in at the 8th grade level.

How much harder do you want it to be?

Reach Real Readers

Get a reading-level reality check with results from the latest U.S. literacy study

“The problem with communication,” said George Bernard Shaw, “is the illusion that it has been accomplished.”

No kidding. Send out a message that’s written at the 11th grade level, for instance, and 97% of U.S. adults won’t be able to understand it, according to the Department of Education’s latest adult literacy test.

Draw more people into your piece and help them read it faster, understand it better and remember it longer.

At Cut Through the Clutter — our two-day hands-on clear-writing master class on April 17-18 in New York — you’ll dive into the results of this massive worldwide literacy study to get a reality check on the level at which your readers really read. (Prepare to be depressed!)

Then you’ll master techniques that get more people to read your piece, read more of it, read it faster, understand it better and remember it longer. You'll learn how to: